I'm HERE!!!!!!!!

I've just arrived in Cambridge, USA! Staying with a friend in MIT right now, will move into my dorm proper on Friday. Flight was long but comfortable, all my things arrived intact, and I'm not missing any limbs. It STILL hasn't hit me that I'm going to spend 5 years here, maybe that'll come with the first piece of coursework.

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Update: 5.30am, 1st Sep 2006

Hmm jet lag's woke me up at 5am, but I guess it's not too bad considering I had 5 hours of sleep. I'm moving into Harvard tomorrow, and the huge mountain of admin-ish stuff looks daunting: register with international office, move into dorm, furnish dorm, open bank account, try to get a phone plan... and all this on top of meeting friends and getting to know new people...

Wow, I'm a fresher again.

Citizen Ka(h)ne

I've just opened up a letter lying on my desk, which turned out to be approval of my application for Singapore citizenship.

Apparently I was supposed to renounce my Malaysian citizenship and then take the Oath of Loyalty on the 18th of August...but I only came back to Singapore a few days ago.

Have asked for deferment of all this, but still not looking forward to it...the whole process is going to take weeks, if I do it next year when I'm back for summer holidays. Basically it'll be:
1) Renounce Malaysian citizenship - 1 or 2 days? ; then
2) Take the Oath of Loyalty to Singapore, and apply for a Singapore passport - 1 to 2 weeks??; then
3) Apply for I-20 visa form from USA - dunno how long, ages?; then
4) Get form and apply for visa at USA embassy - 1 week.

I'm going to have like a month's disruption (or more!) in the middle of my studies, great. Anyways, I'm not going to be bothered about it now. Just spent the entire night packing; slept 2 hours, and sleep deprivation gets me first lethargic, then drunk(ish), so now I'm slightly stoned.

As I was telling someone, it hasn't really hit me yet that I'm going to Harvard... mentally I kinda feel like the rest of the week will be spent in Singapore as usual, with the slacking and normal routine... but in about 2 days' time the change will hit me ready or not...

This might be the last post till I settle in in my dorm room and get an internet connection, unles I manage to find internet terminals in the airports. So farewell! Goodbye to all my friends here, and I'll see you in a year's time!

Go west

Flight SQ0022
Singapore to Newark, New Jersey
Departing: Aug 30, 11am
Arriving: Aug 30, 5.40pm
Duration: 18 hours and 40 mins

Flight CO1198
Newark to Boston
Departing: Aug 30 9.30pm
Arriving: Aug 30, 10.48pm
Duration: Not that long compared to above

I'm still trying to pack...way below the weight limit (think I'll have 35kg, out of a 64kg limit --> UK bound ppl read and weep)... but I'm hitting the volume limit, cold weather wear is damn bulky...

Boston's climate (from Wikipedia):
The hottest month is July, with an average high of28 °C and a low of 18 °C. The coldest month is January, with an average high of 2.2 °C and a low of -5.6 °C. Periods ... below -12.2 °C in winter are not uncommon, but rarely prolonged. The record low temperature is -28 °C, recorded on February 9, 1934.

If global warming ever had an effect, here's to hoping it's working on Boston.

And I'm staying in Perkins Hall Room 422...it's a small room; here's a picture of it from the uni website:

T_T big step down from my gigantic room in Staircase 4 in Christ's....

3 more days to meet up with people and say goodbye.

8 planets now

As of today, Pluto is no longer considered a planet.

Goodbye Pluto.

Back to Malaysia

So I'm finally unemployed!

The lab held a BBQ to celebrate my good riddance, amongst a few others....

That's a Margarita in my hand...Funny enough how I never learned to drink in the 3 years in Cambridge, where the halls are overflowing with wine, the pubs gushing with beer and the garden parties with liberal amounts of champaigne, but rather in the 1 year here in Singapore...

That's my supervisor...yeah I can finally let loose the terror I've felt working for him this whole year, haha...

And he even gave me a parting gift:


Apparently when he approached the bookshop counter his first request was for "Seduction for Dummies"...when they told him there was no such book he requested for anything with seduction...haha and he was with his girlfriend so the counter lady was looking at him weird....

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So I've been back in Klang for a week now...have been sleeping most of the time actually, I think it's the sleep debt accumulated over the one year...like 4 naps a day or something like that....but on Saturday the family went for my brother's convocation at the Multimedia University...it was set up during the dot-com boom, when everyone was crazy about information technology, hence the name...

Man it was soo long....we had to wake up at 5.30am to get there by 7.30am...the ceremony started at 8.30am, and the crazy thing was that they had 3 speakers, each speaking for about half an hour...so that's a 1.5 hour long wait...

And get this, they got the VIP to hand over the graduation certificates for 3000 graduands....assuming 5 secs per student that's over 4 hours.....it started getting unbearable after the first hour or so...and then just got plain surreal....you could see the faculty and VIPs on stage getting bored, but they're unable to doze off or read a book, so they've just got to sit there for 6 hours and bear it...especially since most of them are very old, I imagine that the thought "Why am I here wasting the limited hours left in my life??" must be constantly on their mind...

So glad that our Cambridge graduation ceremony is less than an hour long, and you actually feel happy while going through the ceremony...

Family picture...we don't actually have many of these, seeing as how I'm usually overseas, and my brother (until recently) and my sister both live in hostels away from home...


But so this time with all of us here, my mum decided to have studio photos taken of the whole family...pictures still developing though...

And with the extremely long covocation, the sun and drizzle throughout the day, and the lack of sleep, I've fallen sick...fever and flu...what a waste of holiday time man...lying in bed and just feeling like crap...